INTRODUCTION 19
some parts to malfunction in a manner analogous to the healing of a biological system, and to protect
itself against dangers in its (open) environment.
1.5 BACKGROUND, ORGANIZATION, AND APPROACH OF THIS REPORT
To better understand potential synergies at the BioComp interface and to facilitate the development
of collaborations between scientific communities in both fields that can better exploit these synergies,
the National Research Council established the Committee on Frontiers at the Interface of Computing
and Biology. The committee hopes that this report will be valuable and important to a variety of
interested parties and constituencies and that scientists who read it will be attracted by the excitement
of research at the interface. To researchers in computer science, the committee hopes to demonstrate
that biology represents an enormously rich problem domain in which their skills and talents can be of
enormous value in ways that go far beyond their value as technical consultants and also that they may
in turn be able to derive inspiration for solving computing problems from biological phenomena and
insights. To researchers in the biological sciences, the committee hopes to show that computing and
information technology have enormous value in changing the traditional intellectual paradigms of
biology and allowing interesting new questions to be posed and answered. To academic administrators,
the committee hopes to provide guidance and principles that facilitate the conduct of research and
education at the BioComp interface. Finally, to funding agencies and organizations, the committee
hopes to provide both a rationale for broadening the kinds of work they support at the BioComp
interface and practices that can enhance and create links between computing and biology.
A note on terminology and scope is required for this report. Within the technology domain are a
number of interconnecting aspects implied by terms such as computing, computation, modeling, com-
puter science, computer engineering, informatics, information technology, scientific computing, and
computational science. Today, there is no one term that defines the breadth of the science and technol-
ogy within the computing and information sciences and technologies. The intent is to use any of these
terms with a broad rather than narrow construction and connotation and to consider the entire domain
of inquiry in terms of an interface to life science. For simplicity, this report uses the term “computing”
to refer to intellectual domains characterized by roots in the union of the terms above.
Although the words “computing” and “computation” are used throughout this report, biology in
the new millennium connects with a number of facets of the exact sciences in a way that cannot be
separated from computer science per se. In particular, biology has a synergistic relationship with math-
ematics, statistics, physics, chemistry, engineering, and theoretical methods—including modeling and
analysis as well as computation and simulation. In this relationship, blind computation is no surrogate
for insight and understanding. In many cases, the fruits of computation are reaped only after careful
and deliberate theoretical analysis, in which the physics, biology, and mathematics underlying a given
system are carefully considered. Although much of the focus of this report is on the exchange between
biology and computing, the reader should consider how the same ideas may be extended to encompass
these other aspects.
Consider, for example, the fact that mathematics plays an essential role in the interpretation of
experimental data and in developing algorithms for machine-assisted computing. Computing is implic-
itly mathematical, and as techniques for mathematical analysis evolve and develop, so will new oppor-
tunities for computing.
These points suggest that any specific limits on the range of coverage of this report are artificial and
somewhat forced. Yet practicality dictates that some limits be set, and thus the committee leaves sys-
tematic coverage of certain important dimensions of the biology-computing interface to other reports.
For example, a 2005 report of the Board on Mathematical Sciences (BMS) of the National Research
Council (NRC) recommends a mathematical sciences research program that allows biological scientists
to make the most effective use of the large amount of existing genomic information and the much larger
and more diverse collections of structural and functional genomic information that are being created,